Bobby was abused by his father. Unfortunately, his mother, Millie, was too meek to protect him, according to author Mary S. Palmer. She also says that as a teenager, Bobby was not allowed to take part in normal teenage activities. He was also 12 years younger than his three siblings, a brother and two sisters. Fair-haired, considered reasonably attractive and with a pleasant personality, Bobby was also rather immature for his age. His immaturity was perhaps because of the control his father exerted over him. In 1983, Bobby shot both his parents, but his father survived. Although aged only 16 at the time of his trial, he was tried as an adult and sentenced to life without parole in an adult penitentiary. Palmer attributes his extreme sentence to the fact that this was the first murder in Cameron for 60 years and the first involving a juvenile. Bobby’s defense was that at the time he was using drugs and did not know what he was doing; furthermore, he has no memory of his actions.
Robert, who found his vocation in the Catholic priesthood, has had a very different life from Bobby's. As a teenager, he was a mature and serious thinker with a compassionate and happy personality. A Catholic from birth, he also had a stable family background. Today, Robert is a priest in Mobile, Alabama, and it was a sermon that he gave about Bobby’s life that inspired the authors to research and write the book.
Bobby’s family were relatively well-off, and his father, Tom, used money as a means of control. He was a secretive man, and many people seemed afraid of him, according to Mary S. Palmer. As she also points out, the father used the crime as a means of continuing to exert control over Bobby. During the trial, he hired a defense attorney of sufficient skill to ensure that Bobby escaped the death sentence. The author speculates that he did this, not out of love for Bobby, but from a desire to keep control over his life. Even in prison, Bobby could not escape him. His father visited him only once, but he sent money regularly, which tied Bobby to him. Bobby is still in prison and has recently been moved to a lower security prison in Louisiana, which is is unusual, according to Palmer. Bobby hopes that his case will be among the juvenile convictions under consideration by the U.S. courts at the time of publication. Currently, Mary S. Palmer is working on a sequel to “The Callings,” called “A Clean Slate.”